Who Was Dale Carnegie?

Impact on Adult Education and Self-Improvement
Propelled by the success of How to Win Friends and Influence People, the Dale Carnegie Institute exploded in popularity. During Carnegie's lifetime, the institute expanded into 750 American cities as well as 15 foreign countries. In 1953, Carnegie moved the institute's headquarters into a converted five-story brownstone warehouse in Manhattan. By the time of his death in 1955, an estimated 450,000 people had taken his classes across the globe. 
While focusing on his lecturing, Carnegie also wrote biographies, motivated by his belief that the best way to learn the secrets of success was to read up on history's most successful people. In 1932, Carnegie published a biography of Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln the Unknown, and he later published several compilations of brief biographical sketches: Little Known Facts about Well Known People (1934), Five Minute Biographies (1937) and Biographical Roundup (1944). He published another self-improvement book, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, in 1948.
After his first marriage ended in divorce in 1931, Carnegie married Dorothy Price Vanderpool in 1944. She played a vital role in the expansion of the Dale Carnegie Institute, specifically helping the institute to develop courses and programs geared toward the emerging class of professional young women.
Carnegie died of Hodgkin's disease on November 1, 1955, at the age of 66. A pioneer in the fields of adult education and self-improvement, Carnegie's books and courses inspired an entire genre of nonfiction writing. Despite an explosion of newer self-help books written over recent decades, How to Win Friends and Influence People remains relevant and useful to professional men and women decades after its initial publishing. 
Since Carnegie's death, the Dale Carnegie Institute has continued to expand and is currently a highly respected business training firm operating in 90 countries. Although he wrote thousands of pages of books and gave hours upon hours of lectures, Carnegie's essential message on how to live a successful life can be summed up by his two most fundamental maxims: "Forget yourself; do things for others" and "Cooperate with the inevitable."
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